Tagged: Homeless

The Connection Youth Services has a new home in downtown in Howell. The program helps homeless and run-away youth. After years of fundraising they were able to buy a historic building that now serves as a drop-in center, and a home-base for its transitional-living program.

Lona Lanning is 19 years old. She’s working on meeting the requirements to get into the transitional-living program. Those requirements include volunteering 30 hours a week at The Connection and taking a life-skills class and working with counselors.

Would-be writers can take part in a workshop this weekend. Groundcover News is hosting the event Saturday, March 26 from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Groundcover is a monthly paper in Washtenaw County that focuses on poverty and homelessness and many of its writers are struggling with those issues.

The workshop is geared toward people who have written for the paper, but anyone can attend.

Freelance writer Vickie Elmer is teaching the class. She says the idea is to have more voices, telling more compelling stories.

The workshop happens at the First Baptist Church in Ann Arbor. Cost is $20, but admission is free if participants promise to write two future articles for the paper.

The city of Flint is racing to complete dozens of home demolitions by the end of the month. City crews are racing the clock and the weather to meet a deadline tied to a federal grant.

John Evans watched Wednesday as a piece of heavy equipment tears into a vacant home on Flint’s north side.  Pulling down its brick chimney.  The bricks splintering wood as they fall.  It’s a welcome sight to John Evans.  He lives next door.  Evans says the vacant home has become a magnet to Flint’s homeless, who often set fires inside to stay warm.

If you want to see why this recession was different from others in recent history, spend a little time over at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries.

They’ve been seeing and feeding people they’ve never seen before, people who never imagined they’d need help.

The other day, I went to see Dr. Chad Audi, the mission’s President and CEO. Not only is their caseload flooded, he said, “more and more we are seeing the working homeless.”

These are people who have jobs, but still have no place to live. The Rescue Mission does what it can to get them into housing, but the need is far greater than it used to be -- and for many, the ability to give is less.

Incidentally, there are some who think of the mission as just a soup kitchen, possibly because of their mass appeals for help with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the homeless. A soup kitchen was pretty much what it the mission was when it was founded a century ago. Founder David Stucky kept people alive with food from his own pantry during the worst of the Great Depression.